Bradford Bulls have delayed a decision over whether to call in the administrators until Monday night, reflecting a growing optimism at Odsal that they will be able to steer a course through their financial crisis and see out the Super League season.

The Bulls had been due to announce on Saturday morning whether they had generated the £500,000 in pledges and hard cash necessary to pay off their obligations to the Inland Revenue and the Royal Bank of Scotland, in addition to paying their staff for the next month. But with the figure tantalisingly close to the target at around £480,000 after a major boost from Friday night's stirring victory over Leeds in front of a 20,851 crowd, the chairman, Peter Hood, decided to extend the deadline until after the Bulls' next fixture, at Widnes on Monday afternoon.

"We'd be daft not to," he said. "The response on Friday night, from Leeds supporters as well as our own, was magnificent, overwhelming even. We'd reached around £480,000 when we had to make the decision, but within a couple of hours of announcing the extension we were past £485,000. So I've no doubt we're going to get past that first target by the end of the weekend.

"The difficult decision then, a moral one really, is whether we're confident enough of raising the additional £500,000 that we would still need to see out the season – because only then would we activate the pledges that so many people have made. It's not as if we're dealing with companies making commercial decisions, we're talking about people offering their own money, so I've got to be sure that taking that money is the right thing to do."

It is during that second phase that the Bulls may be forced to consider more orthodox ways of raising money such as the sale players – with John Bateman, a gifted teenage forward, likely to command a fee well into six figures from Warrington. Hood is also hopeful that letters written to the chairman of RBS by rugby league's All Party Parliamentary Group, and now the new players' union, may persuade Bradford's local branch manager to ease the pressure on the club.

Almost unnoticed, the Bulls' victory on Friday lifted them to joint sixth in the table with Leeds, one point ahead of St Helens, and another win at struggling Widnes on Monday would put them firmly on course to qualify for the top eight play-offs for the first time since 2008. They should receive a major boost from the return of Craig Kopzcak, the prop who played so well for Wales in last autumn's Four Nations series and has missed the last five matches with a badly broken finger.

Elsewhere on Monday four of the top five face each other, with the Catalan Dragons confident of a club record crowd approaching 12,000 at the Stade Gilbert Brutus for the visit of Warrington, and the leaders Huddersfield playing their second home game of the Easter weekend against a Hull team who have climbed to second with six consecutive wins.